It is great to see people coming together and doing something cool on a Saturday. The Open Economics Hackday gathered more than thirty people at the Barbican and online, crafting fancy visualisations, wrangling data and being creative together.

The day was devoted to ideas in open economics, as a transparent and collaborative academic discipline, which presents research outputs in a comprehensible way to the general public.

We aimed at building Yourtopia 2, an interactive application showing the development of Italy on several key social progress indicators over time. Building on preceding experience with alternative non-GDP measures of human development (Yourtopia), the new project’s objective is to show how different progress can be in the separate Italian regions, as Italy is traditionally a country with stark regional inequalities.

Although originally used as a term for the gatherings of computer programmers, the Open Economics Hackday was open to people with different backgrounds and various skills. Programmers were creating bits of code, data journalists were gathering and processing data, economists were making sure the project concept addresses key problems in this field of research.

Would you like to help finish the Yourtopia 2 application? Please join the follow-up online meeting this Saturday at 2pm GMT. Confirm your participation by typing in your name on the Etherpad: http://econ.okfnpad.org/hackathon-jan-2011.

Velichka is Project Coordinator of Open Economics at the Open Knowledge Foundation. She is based in London, a graduate of economics (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) and environmental policy (University of Cambridge) and a fellow of the Heinrich Böll Foundation @vndimitrova